You begin play with a single avatar that you steadily improve – complete quests for experience points that level you onwards to greater power and abilities, collect items like rings and weapons and armour for increased aesthetic glory, and amass your personal wealth. As the game progresses, you'll collect up to seven other individual heroes that will always sit just under your main character in power, but you can tweak them in all the same ways. This isn't a million miles from Dungeon Siege; however, gameplay never devolves into merely tapping a key for health potions, and as such, SpellForce 2 comes across as more dynamic than Microsoft's squad-RPG. Underneath all of this are the strategic aspects: resource management, base-building, tech-tree advancement, and large troop tactics.